Measuring Success in Family Businesses: The Concept of Configurational Fit
研究了小企业成功衡量中的主观偏差问题，基于103家奥地利家族企业调查，发现构型匹配的聚合指标能有效克服这些偏差。
The problems associated with measuring success in small businesses are primarily caused by a lack of comparable data due to the ambiguity of “success” and by subjective biases. Success evaluation is dominated by the estimates of business owners, who tend to overestimate overall success and internal strengths. However, reliable success measurement instruments would be useful for small business owners/managers as well as small business policymakers. The main purposes of this article are to compare various measures of success, to explore the differences in their outcomes, and to analyze whether a model of success measurement using configurational fit can be used to overcome subjective biases. The study is based on a recent survey of 103 small family-owned businesses in the eastern Austrian border region. Our analysis of the data confirmed the existence of the measurement problems mentioned above. Although some individual indicators show significant biases as well as effects due to company age, size, and industry, the aggregated indicator based on the concept of configurational fit seems to be an appropriate means of overcoming most of these drawbacks.